Please Come Back To Me: Stories and a Novella

By Jessica Treadway

Please Come Back To Me is another remarkable collection by an author the New York Times has called “a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth.”

In “The Nurse and the Black Lagoon” a woman tries to understand why her teenage son has been accused of a disturbing crime. In “Testimony” an adult daughter visiting her father does everything she can to keep herself from remembering what she believes she cannot bear. A man returns to his hometown in “Dear Nicole” to face the realization that he married the wrong woman out of misplaced guilt. “Oregon” portrays the internal struggle of a woman who, having years ago betrayed a secret entrusted to her by her best friend, is tempted to repeat the mistake with the same friend’s daughter. And in the collection’s novella, “Please Come Back To Me,” a young widow seeks faith and comfort—in both natural and supernatural realms—after her husband’s death leaves her alone to care for their infant son.

On the surface, Jessica Treadway’s stories offer realistic portrayals of people in situations that make them question their roles as family members, their ability to do the right thing, and even their sanity. But Treadway’s psychic landscapes are tinged with a sense of the surreal, inviting readers to recognize—as her characters do—that very little is actually as it seems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9780820337517

Jessica Treadway

JESSICA TREADWAY is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston. She is the author of Absent Without Leave and Other Stories, winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and a novel, And Give You Peace.

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The Nurse and the Black Lagoon

WHEN THE PHONE RANG, Irene let it go because it came in the middle of a reality show she would not have wanted her children to waste their time on, it was so stupid; but since nobody else was home, she’d decided to indulge herself. She didn’t listen to the phone message until the commercial. A man’s voice, deep toned but without inflection, rumbled through the wire: Lieutenant John Scully of the Morton Police here, I’m looking for Joseph or Irene Ludwig. We have your son Brian in custody at the station. You probably know where it is on Elm Avenue, the old Hardy school. Please call us or come down as soon as you get this message. Your son is safe, but something of a serious nature has occurred. He disconnected without saying good-bye, as if he knew that to do so would compromise the urgency he felt obliged to convey.

Irene stood frozen over the phone with the remote control still in her hand. Her show had come back on and she meant to mute it, but her finger wouldn’t work. When she managed to move again, breathing sounds of anxiety out of her nose, she started to dial the number printed on the neon orange Town Information sticker that had puckered and faded from sitting in the family room’s direct sunlight over the years. Police, Fire, Poison Control.

But before she could complete the call, she hung up and, instead, pressed the necessary buttons on the remote control to record the remainder of the reality show. Joe was appalled at this later, and she was surprised herself when she realized what she had done. I think it was my way of not letting it sink in, the phone call, she told her husband. I didn’t want to know what it was. By the time they had this conversation, she had bailed Brian out and he had sequestered himself in his bedroom. Joe and Irene were trying to decide what to do next. Katy was ignoring the phone messages from her friends, watching and rewatching the stupid program her mother had recorded.

When Irene had arrived at the police station Sunday night, she’d let herself entertain, although only for a few seconds, the idea that the something of a serious nature had happened to Brian, even though the officer had assured her that her son was safe. But then, she reasoned, the police would have come to the house if he’d been in an accident. Wouldn’t they? That’s how they notified parents on TV. So she allowed her mind’s eye to wander in the other direction on the spectrum of possibilities, imagining that Brian might have been caught with other kids in the woods by the high school, drinking beer.

It made her sad to realize that this was wishful thinking. The drinking-beer-in-the-woods behavior would belong to Katy when she got a little older, not to Brian, whose few friends were more apt to spend their time alone in their rooms like him, playing computer and video games.

When she saw him in the room where the police were holding him, she felt a rise of the fresh, uncomplicated joy she hadn’t remembered since before her children were teenagers. There he is. And he didn’t appear to be injured.

Yet clearly, something was wrong; he wouldn’t look at her. Is your husband with you, Mrs. Ludwig? the lieutenant asked. It would be best if you both could be here.

He’s in Chicago, she told him, for work. I’ll call him. But I wanted to find out what was going on, first.

Mom, Brian said. It was the voice of her six-year-old son from ten years earlier, confessing to her on Christmas afternoon. She’d found him crying next to the Christmas tree, next to the 215-piece airport-and-helipad set she and Joe had spent hours assembling in front of the kids’ stockings the night before. I heard you guys, Brian had cried into her sweater, where he pitched himself after she asked him what was wrong. I sat on the stairs and watched you and Daddy put it together. They’d had the Santa Claus talk then and there, much earlier than Irene had planned or wanted, and without Joe, who had taken a noon flight to Florida on Christmas—Christmas Day, damn it! she’d snapped at him on the phone that night—for a convention he had to set up.

He’ll get over it, Joe’d told her. "For God’s sake, Irene, it’s Santa Claus. Tell him children are starving in Africa."

He’s six, she’d said. Don’t be ridiculous.

He’s old enough to understand starving, Joe shot back, before some client called and he had to get off the phone.

I’m sorry, Brian said to her, now as he had then, and she felt herself preparing to tell him he hadn’t done anything wrong.

It’s okay, honey, she said, realizing that though it was silly she still wished he would throw himself at her, as he had then, in the belief that there might be some comfort for him in her arms.

But her son was backing up against the white wall. What, honey? she said. The sight and feel of him retreating made her skull go cold.

Have a seat, Mrs. Ludwig, the lieutenant told her, and she sensed in him the sympathy of one who has the delicate duty of changing somebody’s life for the worse.

What Brian had done, the police told Irene, was burn down the playground at Eastbrooke Elementary School. A neighbor whose yard bordered the playground called 911 at 6:16 p.m., during halftime of the Giants game, to report the fire. By the time the trucks got there, the whole thing was gutted, the entire wood-based structure in which every piece of equipment—the round drum of the crawl tunnel, the monkey bars, the spiral stairs climbing to yellow slides—was connected to another. The only parts left remotely recognizable were the chains connecting rubber tires through the obstacle course, and the steering wheel that encouraged kids to pretend they were captaining a ship full of playmates through a cedar-chip sea.

Of course, Lieutenant Scully didn’t go into these details. Irene knew them because of the pictures she saw on the news that night. All the officer said was that Brian was being held on suspicion of malicious destruction of property at the school. He had been seen watching the firemen from the hill to one side of the playground, overlooking the kickball field. He didn’t try to run when the police approached him, but he had no account of why he was there. He didn’t respond when they asked if he’d set the fire.

This is impossible, Irene said, but she didn’t go into why—the memory of the day the playground had been built, a Saturday in May at the end of Brian’s second-grade year. One of the Eastbrooke fathers, an architect, had presented a plan to replace the metal jungle gym and swing set that had been collecting dents and rust since the ’70s. Irene joined the committee of parents charged with applying for permits, renting equipment, and organizing a schedule. The new playground could be put up in one long day of work by volunteers under a construction supervisor, the architect said, so a date was designated and more than a hundred people showed up, with many entire families, including Irene’s. A group of mothers babysat while other parents took up pieces of the prefab circuits constituting the new playground. It was the first stunning spring day of the year, the sun high over a faint warm breeze. Irene had never been so exhausted as at the finish, when everyone gathered on the hill to eat pizza and admire what they had accomplished, the gleaming and colorful structures the kids swarmed as soon as the safety inspector deemed it okay. Irene remembered imagining that this was what it must feel like to the Amish during a barn raising: the sense of pride and fulfillment in belonging to a group whose members worked so hard for the common good.

Thinking of that day as she listened to what Lieutenant Scully told her, Irene tried to recall if there had been anything negative about the experience. She remembered a brief but palpable panic when Laura and Stew Bender’s daughter Ellie went missing; she was found moments after the search began, having chased a cat into the woods. Afterward, Laura Bender was part of the pizza cleanup crew with Irene. "I knew she had to be somewhere, Irene remembered Laura saying several times, giddy with relief. There’s that line, you know? Between thinking they’re okay and thinking they might actually be gone somehow? I never crossed that line this time, but one more minute—well, I was getting close." The other mothers, including Irene, nodded; they all knew which line she meant.

Now that Irene thought about it, she remembered that Brian, who was in Ellie Bender’s class, had gone blank when it first seemed she was missing. Gone blank was a phrase Irene used to herself, to describe what she saw in her son’s face sometimes (and what she felt sometimes in her own): an expression that might have looked mild or innocuous to a bystander, but that in fact actively concealed a measure of emotion he did not want to risk showing, because he was afraid it could not be contained.

Unlike her brother, Katy hadn’t inherited this trait of Irene’s. Their daughter took after Joe, who had little talent for hiding anything. It meant that Joe and Irene didn’t have to worry about her using drugs or having sex they wouldn’t know about, and this was a relief; but it also meant that when she was angry at one or both of them—which, lately, was often—she didn’t stomp out of the room to sulk in private, but remained to let them feel the full force of her fury. Even after unleashing a torrent of words she would not leave their presence, as if she wanted to be sure their focus would not shift from whatever complaint or passion of hers had inflamed the fight.

Facing Brian in the police station, Irene found herself wishing that her son could be more like his sister. She felt she would give anything to be able to read his now-more-than-ever-gone-blank face. Was it outrage at having been accused of something he would never imagine doing? Was it fear? Or—this possibility was one she had to avert her eyes to consider—could it be guilt?

This is impossible, she’d said, and she meant all of it: the trip to the police station, the information about the playground being burned down, the fact of Brian being held in connection with the crime. This is impossible, she’d said, but the truth (she saw, when she could finally look up) was that it wasn’t.

Joe took the first plane he could book after the meeting on Monday he couldn’t get out of.

You’d get out of it if he were dead, Irene accused him over the phone. If he was in the hospital.

But he’s not. Joe made the clicking sound with his tongue that drove her crazier than any other habit of any person she’d ever known. He said he couldn’t help it—that it was a reflex—but she believed he could stop if he tried, so it was a steady source of conflict between them, especially because it became more pronounced when he was tense or afraid. He’s neither of those things. He’s fine. We’ll figure it out, Irene.

The flight put him at the airport at six o’clock, rush hour, and Irene, who hated driving on the highway, asked him to take a cab home. I don’t want to do that, he told her. We need to talk without the kids around.

Couldn’t we just go out somewhere when you get home? she said, but she knew he was right, and she also knew that if she were to be honest with herself, she was trying to put this off—talking with Joe—because until then she might be able to pretend that it wasn’t such a big deal, even if it were true that Brian had burned down the playground. Maybe it had been an accident. Maybe he’d been experimenting with cigarettes, or—what else? What else could it have been? There had to be something that made sense. When they’d come home from the police station, she tried to talk to Brian. She went to his room carrying a plate of cut-up apples with the skins peeled off, the snack she always fed him when he was three and four and five years old, watching Thomas the Tank Engine videos before bedtime.

He’d come to the door when she knocked, and opened it halfway and timidly. When he saw the plate of apples in her hand he just stared at it, even as she held it out to him. Then he said, You’ve got to be kidding, Mom, in a voice that, despite the words, wasn’t mean—in fact, it was so gentle she almost didn’t hear it. Then he closed the door, also gently, and she could tell he remained just on the other side of it, listening, as long as she did. She wanted to ask, Brian, can’t we talk? but if she were being honest, she had to admit that she had no idea what to say to him, how to talk about this, or how to act. She had to admit the relief she felt when he left the door closed and she could feel him waiting for her to walk away.

Joe wanted her to drive home from the airport because of the Ativan he’d taken during the flight. She liked it when he took Ativan because it made the clicking sound go away. She asked for one and he declined and she said, "Why not, you asshole? One little pill, and he turned toward her and said, You just called me an asshole? and she said You heard me," and he flicked the dashboard with two ineffectual fingers, and Irene laughed.

What the hell is wrong with you? Joe said. Have you gone crazy, too? He put his hands in the Let me explain things to you position that had annoyed Irene since their first date. "I go away on Wednesday and everything is fine. Monday I come home because my kid burned down a playground, and now my wife is calling me an asshole because I won’t give her a medication that was prescribed for me. He pressed his palms together in a martyred prayer. Do I have that right?"

Stop being so sanctimonious, she told him. She pulled over to the shoulder, where she collapsed her face over the steering wheel and began to heave.

Ah, Reenie. He hadn’t called her that in years—more than thirty pounds ago, she realized. Ah, God. Joe was patting her knee and at the same time craning in his seat to look at the traffic whizzing past them in a blare of horns. "We really should keep going here—this isn’t safe. Honey. She knew he was right but she didn’t seem to be able to stop crying. Crying was what it felt like, anyway—there were no tears. Reenie, let’s switch. Come on. I’ll drive us." Another round of beeps and blasts as they opened their doors and each walked to the other side of the car, Irene still holding her face. It was another five minutes before they found an opening to ease back into traffic. They spent the time silent as the car filled with their dread.

At home they sat in the driveway instead of going straight in. They watched as Katy, in her bedroom, pulled her curtain aside, looked out at them, then walked away from the window without giving them any sign. "What’s he doing?" Joe asked, giving a nod toward the other window.

Irene shrugged but only halfway, leaving her shoulders raised. I don’t know. Neither of them went to school today. He wouldn’t come out. Slowly she allowed her posture to deflate. What should we do?

Joe pinched his nose with his thumb and forefinger, a gesture she had come to associate over the years with stalling as he tried to figure out what to say. Maybe this isn’t as bad as it seems, he began, but Irene interrupted him.

I already tried that. It doesn’t work. She opened her door and he looked at her; she felt like reaching across the seat and smacking the fear out of his face. Come on. His reluctance to follow her out of the car reminded her of the days when Brian and Katy were children, dawdling over some toy they’d been playing with during a ride. Just a minute, Mom, they told her, slow to exit their booster seats at two and four and six years old, eyes focused on the handheld pinball game as they practiced being teenagers, affronted by her power.

The house was quiet, an eerie sign. Usually, if the kids weren’t watching television, there was at least the beat of a stereo thumping from one or both of their rooms. Irene resisted the impulse to turn on the TV for benign company, a laugh track or talk show or even the smarmy sounds of paid programming. Hungry? she asked Joe, and he looked up surprised and hopeful at the solicitude in her tone. Then she saw understanding cross his face, the realization that now she was stalling, and that her question had nothing to do with how he felt—with his hunger or nervousness or guilt about why he’d been called home early, his boy suspected of a crime. So he would not give Irene what she wanted, the time she would have welcomed to make a sandwich or pour him a beer. No, he said, Let’s go get him, and they were both aware that he sounded like a man about to hunt the one who was stalking his family, instead of his own tall sweet son.

Irene climbed the stairs first, feeling Joe’s step behind her, heavy on her heels. In the hall they ran into Katy on her way to the bathroom. Her face looked swollen, not from tears but with an influx of knowledge too big for the space it occupied. Be nice to him, she told her parents. He feels bad.

"Well I would hope so," Joe said, and mother and daughter sent him silent rays of contempt.

Irene asked, Are you going to Chelsea’s? but Katy gave her a look that implied she was crazy.

I can’t go anywhere, she accused them. We’re going to have to move, you know. To a whole new town somewhere. In a whole new state.

Irene said, Don’t be ridiculous.

"Oh, don’t you." Their daughter shut the bathroom door with as close to a slam as she dared.

They knocked on Brian’s door and when there was no answer, they went in. He was sitting at his desk looking at the computer, where an avatar game filled the screen. Turn that off, Joe said, and without swiveling to face them, Brian complied; the sound of the computer going dead was a grievous sigh.

Brian, Irene said, what happened? She sat on the bed, but Joe remained standing. Brian stood up from the computer and leaned against the desk as he had leaned against the wall at the police station, backing away from Irene. He was so tall he had to bend so his head wouldn’t hit the bookshelf above him. When he was younger, the shelf had been squeezed tight—with National Geographic volumes about the solar system, Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, King Tut pop-ups, all the Narnia books. (One weekend, inspired by Narnia, he had created his own universe on a piece of poster board; Irene remembered some of the planet and continent names, even now: Spartica, Willing, Playhow.) Now the bookshelf contained the boxes from computer games, discarded pieces of Lego sets, and bottles of the aspirin he downed more often than Irene suspected was healthy, for the headaches neither he nor the doctors could explain. He reached for one of the bottles now, but it was empty. He slammed it into the wastebasket, which wobbled from the force.

Joe said, Did you do this thing, Brian? Irene could hear in her husband’s voice the desperate plea for a denial.

Brian shrugged, but she could see it wasn’t meant to be elusive or insolent—just a preliminary gesture to answering. Yeah.

Joe let out a breath she sensed he had been holding since she’d called him from the police station the night before. She waited for him to say Why? but when he didn’t, she understood; it left a space for her to ask the question, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, either.

Because he’s a freaking wack job. They hadn’t heard the bedroom door opening, or Katy coming in. She stood with her long arms crossed in front of her. The small wings of her black hair stood up beside her temples, as if she had been able to shape them with her anger, instead of her usual gel.

Kate, Brian said. He made a barely perceptible movement toward his sister, but stopped himself as if realizing she would not welcome it. Irene felt the crack in her heart widen. I’m sorry.

"Sorry? How about crazy?" When Katy spoke lately, she tended to raise her eyebrows so high in her forehead they disappeared into her bangs. This time the brows came back down almost immediately in a melting motion, and Irene saw that it wasn’t anger her daughter felt now—it was fear. And this Irene understood, because she felt it, too. In fact, as she stood between the walls of her son’s room, which seemed too small to contain the whole family, she recognized that fear was what they all felt, including Brian.

Could I be alone now, please? Brian gestured with his head toward the door.

Katy told him, Whatever you say, freako, flouncing into the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door. Irene—who would be ashamed of this for the rest of her life—took the easy way and followed Katy out of the room, even though she sensed (and knew she was right in sensing) that her son, despite what he said, did not want his family to leave.

Joe stayed. I’m not moving till I get some answers, Irene heard him say as she shut the door behind her, closing the truth inside.

She went to the basement. She was sure of what she was looking for, and yet she could not find it. It was the oddest thing, so odd that she convinced herself for a few moments that someone—Katy, or—no—Brian, it would have to have been—had taken the boxes and hidden them, specifically so she would not be able to locate them at a time like this. But why? It took her several minutes of searching and puzzling to remember, slowly, that the boxes were gone, and that she knew this; they had not survived the flood that soaked the basement two or three Aprils ago, and though she had tried to air everything out and to fool herself into believing it would dry, all of it was lost. After that they put down pallets but it didn’t really matter, because they would never have anything again as valuable as what the storm had already ruined.

The boxes had contained the children’s artwork and other projects from nursery through middle school—all the poignant artifacts of childhood seeped through and puckered, warped or dismembered beyond value even to the mother of their creators. What do you need this stuff for, anyway? Katy had demanded, as Irene surveyed the sodden boxes and couldn’t hold back her tears. The crying made Katy madder, and Brian had gone blank and turned away. Joe had to be the one to cart the boxes to the curb.

Irene had forgotten all of this until now, as she stood in the basement with her hands twitching, knowing what they wanted but finding nothing to light on to take the twitch away.

When the